The ISS expedition 8, a 10 days “taxi” flight Soyuz
Mission to the International Space Station (ISS) to
replace the two-member ISS crew, took place during
October 2003. Within the Spanish Cervantes Scientific
Mission, in this crew exchanging flight, some biological
experiments were performed. The third member of the
expedition, the Spanish born ESA astronaut Pedro Duque,
returned with the Soyuz 7 capsule and the experiment
containing transport box after 11 days on microgravity. In
the GENE experiment, we intended to determine how
microgravity affects the organism rebuilding processes
that occurs during Drosophila metamorphosis. In addition
to the ISS samples, some control experiments were
performed including a 1g Ground control parallel to the
ISS flight samples, a Random Position Machine
microgravity si m u l a t e d c o n t r o l a n d a p a r a l l e l
Hypergravity (10g) exposed samples experiment. We
have used extracted RNA from these samples to test the
differences among gene expression during Drosophila
development with one of the current more powerful
technology, a Drosophila complete genome microarray
(version 1.0, AffymetrixTM). A preliminary analysis of the
results indicates that around five hundred genes change
their expression profiles being especially affected the
mitochondrial ribosomal ones.

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Manuscript long version, prior to reduction due to the mandatory final 2-pages published version